Re: Severe fdisk problem leading to data loss?

[Curtis Gedak <gedakc@gmail.com>]

On 13-11-27 01:08 PM, Phillip Susi wrote:
> On 11/27/2013 2:58 PM, Curtis Gedak wrote:
>> Unfortunately at least one company produces devices that have
>> partitions with ID set to 0, yet these same partitions contain
>> data.
>>
>> An Apple iPod Shuffle is such an example as shown in the following
>> fdisk output:
> Wow, what is in there?  And more hilariously, what happens when you
> plug the thing into a Windows machine and try to create a partition in
> the "free space"?
>
> Also, I thought iPods don't use the USB MASS STORAGE protocol so they
> don't show up as a block device at all; you have to use iTunes to
> access them.

IIRC, the partition with ID = 0 contains the firmware for the Apple 
iPod.  The device is recognized in GNU/Linux, and files can be copied to 
and from the FAT partition.  However, since the iPod firmware uses a 
database to keep track of songs, only songs transferred to the device 
using "iPod aware" software will be seen by the iPod music player.  
Amarok is an example of a native GNU/Linux application that is iPod aware.

IMHO Apple's choice of using an ID of zero for the firmware partition is 
a poor decision.  With that being said, these devices with this strange 
ID setting do exist in the real world.

Curtis